


she's got mail

by nowrunalong



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-29
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-04 03:16:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2907269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowrunalong/pseuds/nowrunalong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A number of mysterious packages arrive at the Powell Estate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	she's got mail

Jackie Tyler was in the middle of putting on a pot of tea when there was a ring at the door. Sighing, she shoved a tea cosy over the pot and went to see who it was. She wasn’t expecting anyone this morning. Maybe it was Howard, she thought hopefully. He’d been coming around again lately. She checked herself appraisingly in the mirror - her hair looked good, and that shade of pink was decidedly her colour. She opened the door, prepared to look pleasantly surprised at Howard’s arrival.

A FedEx deliveryman - whose name was, incidentally, Howard, although Jackie would never know this - greeted her with a bored ‘afternoon, ma’am’.

“Parcel for Jackie Tyler,” he announced.

“But I didn’t order anything! What the bloody hell is that?”

The parcel was 3 feet tall, L-shaped, and wrapped in brown paper. There were about 20 stamps down the side of it, and no return address.

“I’ve no idea, ma’am, but you need to sign here.”

Nonplussed, Jackie took the pen and scrawled her signature onto the delivery slip.

The FedEx man deposited the parcel in her front hall and was gone as soon as he’d come.

Jackie closed the door behind her and stared down at the thing, hands on hips. What was she supposed to do with this? Who’d ordered it? It couldn’t have been Rose; she was still off travelling with that good-for-nothing Doctor.

After she’d dragged the parcel - it was even heavier than it looked - to the kitchen, Jackie tore the paper off.

Inside was… well, Jackie wasn’t sure _what_ it was. It was roughly the same shape as the package it’d come in, and it was dark, it had a little round hole at the bottom and a large one at the top. If Jackie had to guess, she’d have said it was some kind of weird telescope. Bev was away in Wales for a month and she was going through an astrology phase. Perhaps it was her.

Jackie put the… whatever-it-was... in a closet and didn’t think much about it for the rest of the day.

— 

The next day, there was another ring at the door, and another strange parcel. There were two the day after that. After the third day, Jackie began to wonder if someone was playing a prank on her, and that maybe she should just leave all this junk in the trash room. But she didn’t; into the closet it went, just in case it _was_ Bev, or Mo, or Rose and that daft alien on planet Zog.

—

Rose and that daft alien weren't on planet Zog (if you mentioned it to the Doctor he’d tell you that Zog was a gaseous planet, anyways, so it was no use trying to land there), but that was the closest guess Jackie had come up with.

The TARDIS was currently spinning around a brand-new star. In the far reaches of another galaxy, there was a type that formed so quickly you could watch its creation, the gases coming together to form a blinding light. Rose and the Doctor had sat in the TARDIS doorway, marvelling over the whole process. Afterwards they’d sprawled out in the media room, the Doctor’s head on Rose’s lap. He was pretending to read a very dry book about particle physics while Rose checked her phone. After a while, the Time Lord grew bored of the silence and closed the book with a loud clap, reaching down to sit it on the floor.

“What are you looking at?”

“Keisha texted me about a sale at the new Henrik’s - they’ve got shoes for half off this week. I might buy a new pair. Mine’ve worn down from all the runnin'.”

“How are you going to do that? I’m not going on a shopping trip to a department store.” The Doctor wrinkled his nose in distaste. “Rooose. There are shoes in over four hundred and eighty-three galaxies and you want to go back to Henrik’s? Where’s that spirit of adventure? We could go to Parlox! They have great boots on Parlox, every colour you could ever dream of, only they come in sets of three because of course the locals have three feet. Still, you could probably talk them into just selling you two. Or, you could take all three and use the third one as a spare, in case something ever happens to one of the other two!” 

Rose laughed. “I don’t want to go to Henrik’s, Doctor. I’m gonna buy them online.”

“How?”

“On my phone, silly."

He gaped up at her.

“Do you really not know about online shopping?”

“We-elll, now that you mention it. Of course I do. It just - how does it work, exactly?”

Rose grinned. “I’ll show you.”

The Doctor sat up and leaned into Rose so that he could see the tiny screen. He watched as she used a credit stick he’d given her to buy the pair of shoes she wanted off the Henrik’s website. She’d entered her home address at the Powell Estate. She didn’t think that Henrik’s - or anyplace, for that matter - would ship to a time and space machine.

“You lookin' for anything?” she joked. She passed the phone over to him, the Henrik’s website still on the screen.

As it turned out, the super-phone could access websites from other planets as well as Earth.

“Oh, but this is brilliant! Look, Rose! It’s an electromagnetic electron super-magnifier! And a compression field reduction detector! Rose! An inter-connected transmission device! And a battery-operated bagel toaster!”

Rose sighed and stretched out on the couch, laying her head on the Doctor’s lap like he had been earlier. She picked up his physics book, opened it to a random page, and hit her face underneath it. She’d created a monster.

—

It wasn’t until the pair of shoes from Henrik’s arrived at the Powell Estate that Jackie Tyler knew for sure who’d ordered the packages. Smiling to herself, she sat the shoebox on top of the electromagnetic electron super-magnifier. _Now_ she was expecting visitors.


End file.
